Fray
by psquare
Summary: Pre-series AU. Sam wanted to tell Jessica the truth... except he wasn't sure if she wasn't already dead. He wasn't sure of anything, any more. Oneshot.


_**A/N:**_ So, apparently, the running theme in all my _Supernatural_ stories is Insane!powerful!Sam. Make of that what you will.

**Warnings: **SPOILERS for the pilot episode, general ones for the rest of Season 1. Angst, blood and gore, serious metaphor-abuse, internal monolouging to beat the devil.

**Disclaimer: **I don't own _Supernatural_ or any of its characters.

_**Fray**_

It came in flashes at first - snatches of screams and fire and blood that Sam attributed to stress and a lifetime of bad experience. He would wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking, countering Jessica's mounting concern with almost half-hearted excuses. However, as the dreams began to take shape, with a head and a tail and a body where Jessica died screaming, pinned to the ceiling with her abdomen cut open and then set on fire, he drowned his nights in caffeine, rattled and beginning to feel afraid.

Jessica hovered between equal parts of anger and concern, but finally settled for acceptance - it was the LSAT, she concluded. She left him alone, and Sam's fear grew with every night.

Then the dreams began to repeat.

It was the same sequence every night - he would enter his apartment in a peculiar sense of contentment and relief, come to his bedroom and flop onto his bed with a happy sigh. The drip of warm liquid onto his forehead would yank his attention to the ceiling, where -

- where Jessica - _cut open_ -

- bleeding on him, and the moment of silence before the world shifted and consumed itself and was spit back in a bloom of uncontrollable fire that destroyed everything that he was and all that he would ever be -

Then darkness, and the dream would start again.

Classes and exams passed by as interims between nightmares that had become his reality and his day. His pen oozed blood that would spell _Jessica_ and _death_ in large jagged letters across his lecture notes; his food crawled with maggots and his bed smelled of freshly turned earth.

Objectively, Sam knew that these dreams were _wrong_, that the sleep and food deprivation was eroding his body and mind, but the fear was such that the few times that he really, truly felt lucid, felt like _himself_, he would obsessively salt the door and the windows to the apartment, keeping aside bottles of holy water, muttering protective incantations and spending hours in the bathroom cleaning and sharpening his weapons.

Jessica tried talking to him several times through all of this, and Sam could tell she was rapidly moving from concern to fear (_fear of __**him**__, and that shouldn't be right, because he was only trying to save her, he -_). He had to tell her. He had to tell her _everything_.

And so it was that he woke up one morning, feeling weak and nauseous but completely clear-headed, and decided it was time.

Jessica wasn't anywhere to be found, although it was five a.m. in the morning and he was mostly sure that she hadn't left during the night. He shifted his gaze across the apartment, at the haphazardly arranged books, scattered laundry, Jessica's collection of hand-made souvenirs, and -

- _and the broken salt line._

Inexorably, as though yanked by some machinery of Fate, Sam looked up at the ceiling.

And there she was, mangled and bloodied, dead eyes staring at him in some perennial accusation.

Sam screamed; screamed rage and fear and soul-devouring loss as fire bloomed from her corpse; screamed as the flames began to lick at his body, burning skin and muscle and hair; screamed until his throat was a burnt husk inside his blackened and melted body and oblivion came and claimed him for its own.

* * *

If this was death, Sam thought, it was being excessively kind to him.

Jessica had her hands on his shoulders, looking as beautiful as ever - maybe even more so, with tears running down her face and her lips repeating his name over and over again.

Sam tried calling her name, but his throat hurt, grinding glass shards caught in soft tissue. She was still asking him what was wrong, and Sam wanted to tell her that it was _all_ wrong, yet so _right_ - Frustrated, he took her face in his hands, and kissed her. Surprised, she reflexively resisted at first, but then gave in, and Sam's hands moved downward as their kiss deepened.

Near her abdomen, he felt something warm and wet.

Startled, he pulled away and stared at his hands. They were bright red with fresh blood - blood that seeped from a long gash across Jessica's abdomen.

The apartment began to burn again.

Sam scrambled back, much to Jessica's confusion. She approached him, one arm extended, completely unaffected by the flames that she walked through, or the guts that spilled from her wound.

Sam fumbled for the gun he had loaded with silver bullets under the pillow, and clicked back the safety, training it on her. She stopped and called out his name again, voice saturated with fear and concern and love (_I love you Sam but you can't keep doing this to yourself what we have can't function if you're not telling me what's wrong with you_) and he loved Jessica too, more than he could possibly say - his aim wavered ever so slightly - so he wanted to tell everything to her, to take back four years of secrecy and denial, but Jessica wasn't _Jessica_ anymore (_he'd seen her die, hadn't he? So many hundreds of times_) and it was too late, so he aimed again and pulled the trigger.

The bullet unerringly hit her heart and Sam watched with a strange detachment as she fell, writhed and gurgled, and finally died.

The _not-_Jessica was dead. Now things should be - should -

The world cracked and splintered and burned, and everything went black for a second time.

* * *

Demons, revenants, vengeful spirits -

_Sam, you have to calm down._

- he couldn't figure out which, but he had put out a protection for each, so why -

_No, no, no, stop!_

- was he still there, still hearing Jessica's voice? And _other _voices, too - it had to be witches, illusory magic, or maybe that yellow-eyed bastard -

_I don't know what's wrong; he... He was screaming, and then he tried to __**shoot**__ me..._

- who killed his mother and every opportunity his family had had at a normal life; and that probably meant he had to call Dad, Dean -

_He's not - uf. I need more help here!_

- he really ought to have called them long before, and it was just - just so typical of him, right? He wasn't ever going to escape the supernatural world by burying his head in the sand, Dad had been right -

_Sam, please._

- but it wasn't too late, even now: he was trained, he could survive these bastards long enough to be able to communicate to them -

_Yeah, yeah, that's it, keep him down..._

_- _but now he wasn't sure how long that was going to be; he could feel several hands holding him down and no matter how he raged, how he fought, he couldn't seem to find an opening to escape -

_I'm so sorry, Sam_.

- he felt a sharp prick at the crook of his elbow; the world swirled in a mass of colours as his anger rose and broke free of him like a dragon that consumed the universe and left him only black vacuum.

* * *

The dreams kept getting worse.

A part of Sam's mind was aware of the drugs being pumped into him at regular intervals, but the people who were giving them just didn't seem to _understand_ - the things he was seeing:Jessica sometimes burning, sometimes a demon; most times dying as Sam murdered her in cold blood. There was something he needed to infer; something that he needed to learn and act upon...

People came and went in the indeterminate time that he lay in a drugged stupor; some of them tried to talk to him, but everytime they looked at him, their eyes would flash reptilian yellow, lips curling back in smirks, and he would _hear_ - (_I couldn't take chances with you Sammy I have great things planned for you_) in his head although their lips never moved. Sam would scream (_it was him that was doing this to Sam's head, __**him**__, and Sam needed to __**leave**__, find Dean -_) but that never got him anywhere, except more sedation.

Sam sometimes felt that the dragon-metaphor was startlingly accurate for his anger: it was a fearsome monster that slumbered, curled around his heart, ready to breathe fire and rouse him into action, given the opportunity. His body felt weak: starved and ill and muscles wasting, but Jessica was still there and still in danger, and he needed to keep himself alive to any avenue of escape...

Sometimes he thought of his brother and Dad; wondered if they had any idea about what was happening to him. Wondered if they really would think he was insane (_of course he was insane_) and if he would ever see them again, given all of his time had flash-frozen to a single _now_ - with no past and no future; his struggling awareness barely coped with the concept before it was beaten down again, and he sank into places too numb even for despair.

At some point in the future, maybe centuries later, (_and he figured this was better; at least he was getting a handle on __**time**__; maybe this was - was the oppor - _) a voice slowly brought him out of a mercury tinged lake of interspersing nightmares (_see, it had to be mercury - metal but liquid; liquid but metal_ _- he should be able to resurface but it had him locked down_) and although he hadn't the strength nor the inclination to listen, the word '_Jessica_' registered, and he beat his way to the surface (_opportu -_). With a great deal of effort, he made his eyes focus on the blob of colour in the otherwise stark room, the features of a man weaving in and out of resolution (_opportunity_).

And the next word that he heard nearly drowned him again - _dead_ - and he felt the dragon blanch and retract (_I am so sorry, but she died in a fire in your apartment_). This wasn't supposed to happen - why else would he see her dying if he wasn't meant, somehow, to prevent it -

He must have said something, because more words followed, jumbled and the beginnings of one melding into the ends of the other, but Sam knew what he was saying; Sam knew this was real; Sam knew Jessica was really dead, and Sam _knew_ -

Sam knew he had failed.

He closed his eyes, and the mercury-lake swallowed him whole.

* * *

The next thing that Sam felt was warmth around his shoulders and against the side of his face, and moisture in his hair. He thought he heard a soft monotony in his ear, a voice repeating his name over and over again, tinged by a familiar concern and love, and an unfamiliar sadness, and something clicked and fell through in his brain and he called his brother's name.

Dean pulled back, but his hands were still on Sam's face, and he sounded delighted. Dean began to talk - about how he'd gotten a call from Stanford (_can you believe the bastards waited a whole week to tell me they'd gotten my brother committed?_), about how out of his mind he had been to come here and discover what had happened (_dude, these people are feeding me the weirdest stories; but don't worry, I'm gonna get you outta here_) about voodoo and illusions and demons and how he was going to fix all of this; Sam caught only snatches but he let Dean's voice fill his being, bringing him a peace he hadn't felt in millenia - and with the peace came sadness and regret and love and fear, more than Sam felt he could deal with -

_You're gonna be okay, Sammy._

Sam laid his head against his brother's shoulder, and cried.

_**Finis**_


End file.
